According to the Board of Education of the Township of Montgomery in Somerset County, N.J., a sixth-grader committed “harassment, intimidation, or bullying” of a classmate:

C.C. admitted making comments to K.S. regarding his decision not to eat meat. The [Board] report found that C.C. told K.S. that “it’s not good to not eat meat” and that “he should eat meat because he’d be smarter and have bigger brains.” C.C. himself wrote that he told K.S. that “vegetarians are idiots.” The anti-bullying specialist found that C.C. stated that K.S.’s response to his comments was amusing to him.

The District concluded that C.C. made verbal communications that were reasonably perceived as being motivated by a distinguishing characteristic between the two boys, namely vegetarianism, which substantially interfered with the rights of K.S. and had the effect of insulting or demeaning him. . . .

Definitions relative to adoption of harassment and bullying prevention policies are found in N.J.S.A. 18A:37-14, which states in part:

“Harassment, intimidation or bullying” means any gesture, any written, verbal or physical act, or any electronic communication, whether it be a single incident or a series of incidents, that is reasonably perceived as being motivated either by any actual or perceived characteristic, such as race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or a mental, physical or sensory disability, or by any other distinguishing characteristic, that takes place on school property, at any school-sponsored function, on a school bus, or off school grounds as provided for in section 16 of P.L.2010, c.122 (C.18A:37-15.3), that substantially disrupts or interferes with the orderly operation of the school or the rights of other students and that:

(a) a reasonable person should know, under the circumstances, will have the effect of physically or emotionally harming a student or damaging the student’s property, or placing a student in reasonable fear of physical or emotional harm to his person or damage to his property;

(b) has the effect of insulting or demeaning any student or group of students; or

(c) creates a hostile educational environment for the student by interfering with a student’s education or by severely or pervasively causing physical or emotional harm to the student.

… In this case, C.C. admitted making comments to K.S. regarding his decision not to eat meat. The report found that C.C. told K.S. that “it’s not good to not eat meat” and that “he should eat meat because he’d be smarter and have bigger brains.” C.C. himself wrote that he told K.S. that “vegetarians are idiots.” I CONCLUDE that those comments are reasonably perceived to be motivated by the distinguishing characteristic of K.S. being a vegetarian.

Note that the decision didn’t single out the nonsubstantive insult — “vegetarians are idiots” — as being the punishable statement. Instead, the decision treated this statement as on par with polite factual and normative claims (whether accurate or not), such as “it’s not good to not eat meat” and “[you] should eat meat because [you]’d be smarter and have bigger brains,” would be “harassment, intimidation, or bullying,” presumably because they can also be “insulting or demeaning.”

The punishment here was modest: “five (5) lunch-time detentions” — during which C.C. “was given the opportunity to speak with staff about his actions, with an intention of preventing future instances of such conduct” — and “no other disciplinary consequences.” But the labels “harassment,” “intimidation,” and “bullying” (as opposed to, say, “rudeness” or “unkindness” or “personal insults”) can often have much broader consequences, as I’ve chronicled in many past posts. And once the law calls such speech “harassment,” “intimidation” or “bullying” in one area, it’s easy fortheselabels to be applied in other areas as well, especially because the labels are so ill-defined and potentially so broad.

Whew! Whether a blog title or a book title it is a title that is certain to bring out the raging hordes of anti-Catholic protestants, bigots, the historically ignorant and the run-of-the-mill Internet denizen short on facts and long on pronouncements.

Thomas E. Woods is an American historian, political commentator and the best selling author of twelve books. Woods is associated with several institutions but perhaps most notably the Mises Institute. His book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization was published in 2012 and is a brilliant, engaging, and stirring defence of Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular.

Let me make it clear here. I am not Catholic. I am not a Catholic apologist. Indeed, since the great schism in 1054 when Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy diverged Roman Catholicism has sprung several branches of outright heresy. Catholicism has also been responsible for several scourges that have resulted in the deaths of millions of non Catholics exclusive of Muslims. (My own opinion is that the reasons for The Crusades were justified although the way they were executed was not.)

Woods does not deal with Catholic heresy nor does he write about Catholic excesses. His book deals exclusivel with the titled matter, How the Catholic Church Built Weastern Civilization and in that regard it is a brilliant treatise.

Popular lore has all this to the contrary. The Church squelched science, we are told. Just look at Galileo. Except the truth lays elsewhere as even a few moments in a history book will show you. Galileo was never persecuted for his science which was championed and accepted by the church. His offence lay elsewhere.

That Wood's premise is true is not in any doubt by any qualified scholar. From education to science to art to literature to charity to hospitals to morality to government the west as we know it, the civilization we live in was built by Catholic thinking.

I could find no fault at all with Wood's facts or their presentation. This is a brilliant book if, perhaps, a little short at 280 pages.

We live in an age where Western Civilization seems to be collapsing at an alarming rate. A great deal, if not all, of the collapse can be blamed on the rot of post-modernism which is leading the west to abandon the very things that built it. By this I do not mean Catholicism but the things with which the Church endowed us that allowed us to climb to heights of civilization while the rest of the world remained backwards and barely out of the stone age.

It has long been known that Christianity in the person of St. Benedict saved civilzation during the collapse of the dark ages. Wood's book is a brilliant and engaging, historicaly precise treatment of how Christianity then built the West we know now.

Ask a college student today what he knows about the Catholic Church and his answer might come down to one word: "corruption." But that one word should be "civilization." Western civilization has given us the miracles of modern science, the wealth of free-market economics, the security of the rule of law, a unique sense of human rights and freedom, charity as a virtue, splendid art and music, a philosophy grounded in reason, and innumerable other gifts that we take for granted as the wealthiest and most powerful civilization in history. But what is the ultimate source of these gifts? Bestselling author and professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. provides the long neglected answer: the Catholic Church. Woods’s story goes far beyond the familiar tale of monks copying manuscripts and preserving the wisdom of classical antiquity. In How theCatholicChurchBuilt Western Civilization, you’ll learn: · Why modern science was born in the Catholic Church · How Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five hundred years before Adam Smith · How the Catholic Church invented the university · Why what you know about the Galileo affair is wrong · How Western law grew out of Church canon law · How the Church humanized the West by insisting on the sacredness of all human life No institution has done more to shape Western civilization than the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church—and in ways that many of us have forgotten or never known. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is essential reading for recovering this lost truth.

About the least fashionable thing one can do these days is utter a kind word about the Catholic Church. The idea that the church has been an obstacle to human progress has been elevated to the level of something everybody thinks he knows. But to the contrary, it is to the Catholic Church more than to any other institution that we owe so many of the treasures of Western civilization. Knowingly or not, scholars operated for two centuries under an Enlightenment prejudice that assumes all progress to come from religious skeptics, and that whatever the church touches is backward, superstitious, even barbaric.

Since the mid-20th century, this unscholarly prejudice has thankfully begun to melt away, and professors of a variety of religious backgrounds, or none at all, increasingly acknowledge the church's contributions.

Nowhere has the revision of what we thought we knew been more dramatic than in the study of the history of science. We all remember what we learned in fourth grade: While scientists were bravely trying to uncover truths about the universe and improve our quality of life, stupid churchmen who hated reason and simply wanted the faithful to shut up and obey placed a ceaseless stream of obstacles in their path.

That was where the conventional wisdom stood just over a century ago, with the publication of Andrew Dickson White's book, "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," in 1896. And that's where most Americans (and Europeans, for that matter) believe it still stands.

But there is scarcely a historian of science in America who would endorse this comic-book version of events today. To the contrary, modern historians of science freely acknowledge the church's contributions — both theoretical and material — to the Scientific Revolution. It was the church's worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws. Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world). It's likewise a little tricky to claim the church has been an implacable foe of the sciences when so many priests were accomplished scientists.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. Father Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory. In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

By the 18th century, writes historian Jonathan Wright, the Jesuits "had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes, and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics, and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light."

Their achievements likewise included "star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics."

These were the great opponents of human progress?

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Father J.B. Macelwane, who wrote the first seismology textbook in America in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In 17th-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible.

Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the 19th century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments and cartography.

The early church also institutionalized the care of widows, orphans, the sick and the poor in ways unseen in classical Greece or Rome. Even her harshest critics, from the fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate all the way to Martin Luther and Voltaire, conceded the church's enormous contributions to the relief of human misery.

The spirit of Catholic charity — that we help those in need not out of any expectation of reciprocity, but as a pure gift, and that we even help those who might not like us — finds no analogue in classical Greece and Rome, but it is this idea of charity that we continue to embrace today.

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the medieval world.

By the time of the Reformation, no secular government had chartered more universities than the church. Edward Grant, who has written on medieval science for Cambridge University Press, points out that intellectual life was robust and debate was vigorous at these universities — the very opposite of the popular presumption.

It is no surprise that the church should have done so much to foster and protect the nascent university system, since the church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

Until the mid-20th century, the history of economic thought started, more or less, with the 18th century and Adam Smith. But beginning with Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist and historian of his field, scholars have begun to point instead to the 16th-century Catholic theologians at Spain's University of Salamanca as the originators of modern economics.

And the list goes on.

I can already hear the complaint: What about these awful things the church did that I heard about in school? For one thing, isn't it a little odd that we never heard any of the material I've presented here in school? Doesn't that seem a trifle unfair?

But although an episode like the medieval Inquisition has been dramatically scaled back in scope and cruelty by recent scholarship — the University of California at Berkeley, not exactly a bastion of traditional Catholicism, published a book substantially revising popular view — it is not my subject here. My aim is to point out, as I do in my book "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," how indebted we are, without realizing it, to an institution popular culture teaches us to despise.

I arrive at my parents house each morning promptly at 6:55 a.m. pulling into the driveway in the same vehicle, unlocking the front door, hanging up my coat and taking off my shoes. Every morning is exactly the same.

Each morning their little dog comes flying out of their bedroom barking at full volume until it gets to the top of the stairs where, looking down at me she stops barking and starts prancing and wagging her tail. I start up the stairs and she stays still long enough for me to pat her and scratch her ears and then it is back to their bedroom and their she stays until my mother gets up.

As soon as mother sits up in bed and swings her feet over the edge the little dog comes out into the hallways and dances and prances and turns in circles her tail wagging all the time. The announcement is clear, "She is getting up."

If someone leaves the house ten times a day and comes back the greeting is the same as if they had been gone for a month.

By the same token if the old folks go out and do not take her the dog sulks. When she sees them getting coats and shoes on she starts the happy dance but if they do not intend to take her Dad will look at her and will just say, "No." The little dog stops in her tracks and goes to her corner and lays down. There she will stay until they come back and no amount of coaxing will get her out until they come home again and then she comes dancing out of her corner all happy again.

Isn't it funny how dogs are so open with their emotions? There is no hiding how they feel. It is all out there in the open.

Anyway, all this made me think this morning. What would humans be like if we expressed emotion as openly as dogs?

What is we danced with excitement every time someone we loved came through the door?

I meant to draw attention to this earlier and it just kept slipping my mind.

So, suppose you claim to be a Christian but at the same time you support Donald Trump. You justify it by saying you cannot support Hilary Clinton's views on abortion or her support of the LGBT agenda or any of her other leftest positions and you see Donald Trump as the best alternative.

What would happen if Donald Trump sat down with the Creator of the universe in a SoHo bistro?

The following statements attributed to Mr. Trump are not fabricated. The mantruly uttered them. Those attributed to God are likewise genuine.

With whom do you agree?

Lattes are poured and chairs, scooted.

The discussion begins.

Trump: “I am a really smart guy. I’m intelligent. Some people would say I’m very, very, very intelligent. I know what sells, and I know what people want.”

God: “[I] oppose the proud, but give grace to the humble. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (James 4:6 and Luke 14:11).

Trump: “Nothing wrong with ego. Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser. Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest – and you all know it!”

God: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches. When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom. But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil” (Jeremiah 9:23, Proverbs 11:2, James 4:16).

Trump: “If you don’t tell people about your success, they probably won’t know about it.”

“Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich. I’m really rich. Cash is king, and that’s one of the beauties of the casino business. And while I can’t honestly say I need an 80-foot living room, I do get a kick out of having one.”

God: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).

Trump: “Fighting for the last penny is a very good philosophy to have. I have black guys counting my money. … I hate it. The only guys I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes all day. Who the f–k knows? I mean, really, who knows how much the Japs will pay for Manhattan property these days?”

God: “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).

The conversation moves on to Mr. Trump’s boasting of his many adulterous affairs.

God: “Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?” (Proverbs 5:20)

Trump: “Nice t-ts, no brains. A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10. Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world, I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, ‘Can you believe what I am getting?'”

God: “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered” (1 Peter 3:7).

Trump: “[Women:] You have to treat ’em like s—t.”

“When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of a– – a good one! – there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”

“If I get my name in the paper, if people pay attention, that’s what matters. You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of a–.”

“It’s all in the hunt, and once you get it, it loses some of its energy. I think competitive, successful men feel that way about women. Don’t you agree? Really, don’t you agree?”

God: “Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for [I] will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous” (Hebrews 13:4).

The discussion shifts to Mr. Trump’s lifelong and, until of late, Democratic Party affiliation, Obamacare and his opposition to a ban on even partial-birth abortion.

God: “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3).

Trump: “No, I am pro-choice in every respect. Very pro-choice. I just believe in choice.”

“I identify more as a Democrat. It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. Hillary’s a great friend of mine. Her husband is a great friend of mine. I think Hillary is going to take it, and I think Hillary is very, very capable. Hillary’s always surrounded herself with very good people. I think Hillary would do a good job.”

“[Obama] is a strong guy who really knows what he wants, and this is what we need. What he has done is amazing.”

“I’m a liberal on health care. I like universal health care. As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland.”

God: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for [I] love a cheerful giver. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Corinthians 9:7; Ephesians 4:28 and 2 Thessalonians 3:10).

The meeting closes with a brief exchange on repentance and forgiveness.

Trump: “For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.”

God: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 5:44, Matthew 6:15).

Trump: “I don’t like to have to ask for forgiveness. Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes?”

God: “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Trump: “I’m going to make America great again.”

God: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people. Good sense is a fountain of life to him who has it, but the instruction of fools is folly” (Proverbs 16:18, 14:34 and 16:22).

And so, God, Mr. Trump and their respective followers part ways, agreeing, for now at least, to disagree.

I ask again, Christian or non-Christian, do you really want this arrogant, ignorant blowhard as your president?